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From invisible to digital: digitising endangered historical documents in Brazil

COURTNEY
J. CAMPBELL 19 May 2016

Without
documents, much of the history of the enslaved is lost. Digitisation offers a
way to preserve rapidly deteriorating documents, but how does one actually set
up a large-scale digitisation project?

The
personal histories of enslaved and oppressed peoples are notoriously difficult
to access. This is especially true of people who lived in earlier historical
periods, since information on their lived experiences usually come via third
parties, such as foreign travellers writing about slavery for European audiences,
or by way of court cases, where their voices are only faintly heard. These
sources are essential to understanding how slave societies worked, but they too
often reduce the enslaved to a nameless and faceless crowd. While documents
about the lives of the enslaved and free people of colour do exist, they tend
to be hard to find and can often be in an advanced state of deterioration. We
need these documents to create human historical narratives and to understand
how individuals justified, resisted, accepted, and fought against enslavement
and other forms of social oppression.

This
piece considers one increasingly important method of bringing the lives of the
invisible to light: the digitisation and dissemination of archival historical
sources related to slavery and its afterlives. I draw upon personal experience
arising from two research projects in the state of Paraíba, Brazil. The first
project successfully digitised 266 ecclesiastical and secular documents stored
at three institutions: the Waldemar Bispo Duarte Historical Archive; the
Paraíba Historical and Geographical Institute in the coastal state capital of
João Pessoa; and the Church of Our Lady of the Miracles of Saint John of the
Cariri in the town of São João do Cariri in the interior of the state. The
project digitised many types of documents, but the most exciting are the
baptismal, marriage, and death records, which list the names and places of
origin of the free, freed, and enslaved, as well as early land grants from the
Portuguese government that describe the terrain in great detail.

A
second project, currently underway, focuses on criminal and notarial records
(such as wills, land deeds, and other documents that require official stamps
and signatures), and is projected to nearly double the first project in size.
All of the materials generated by both projects are made accessible via the
Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies (ESSSS) website, which
is housed at Vanderbilt University. Both projects have been supported by the
Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) of the British Library, in turn supported
by Arcadia, a fund dedicated to both environmental and historical conservation.

The
following remarks explain the five main steps associated with these
digitisation projects, and offer practical advice for undertaking similar
projects in the future.

Step
one: identifying partners and securing permissions

Digitisation
projects require the investment and expertise of many institutions and
individuals. The first step involved entering into a partnership with ESSSS to
house our digitised documents. This was done by contacting Vanderbilt
University to explain how our digitised documents fit within the overall
project of preserving and making available to the public documents related to
slavery. Vanderbilt accepts the documents, ensures that they are hosted across
several servers in several locations, and provides and updates the web
interface for viewing.

While
carrying out research in Paraíba, I met Solange Rocha and Vitória Lima of the
Federal University of Paraíba, who were eager to co-coordinate a digitisation
project. We brainstormed a list of archival institutions that might be suitable
partners and we quickly came to agreements with the three institutions listed
above. Once we had established verbal confirmation with each institution, we
quickly sought written agreements giving permission to digitise the documents
on site and make the images available online.

We
carefully explained to our institutional partners both the benefits (for
example, less day-to-day damage to documents by researchers in the archives and
greater institutional visibility online) and risks (for example, damage done to
documents during digitisation or reduced need for people to consult within the
archive itself) so that they could make an informed decision before giving us
permission to digitise. If an institution expressed serious doubts, we gave
them time to consider the possibility and make the decision according to their
institutional aims and needs. We also agreed to leave a set of digitisation
equipment and provide copies of the digitised images on hard drives to each
partnering institution.

Step
two: applying for funding and seeking advice

I
decided to apply for an EAP grant because this programme focuses on archives
whose contents are endangered by environmental, infrastructural, and/or
political conditions. The project archives were strong candidates because the
humid environment of the north-eastern coast of Brazil and a lack of funding to
conserve historical documents in the region had already left important
historical documents to decay. To support the application, I recruited a number
of experts to the project team, and also consulted sample grant applications
from colleagues who had secured similar funding in the past.

These
consultations were particularly important when it came to putting together a
realistic list of equipment required for the project, including digital
cameras, laptops, tripods, carrying cases, rulers, and colour charts. Without
this step, we might not have thought of ball heads for tripods to allow the
cameras to point downward and remote shutter releases to keep the camera from
trembling (see Step four for more on the types of cameras we use). The final
submission included a detailed monthly timeline and budget justifications for
each proposed expense, along with letters and photographs from the archives. As
with all applications, this process proved to be very time consuming.

Step
three: providing specialised training and project oversight

Our
project took off once funding was secured, starting with the recruitment of
students, archival staff, and faculty to help with digitisation and other
tasks. This expanded project team completed training regarding how to handle
fragile historical documents, including information on British Library EAP
guidelines for copying images and creating listing metadata (translated into
Portuguese). Other issues included making effective use of cameras, controlling
for light variations, adjusting white balance, and setting up tripods. As with
all research projects, it also proved necessary to provide administrative
support, transfer funds and manage budgets, complete interim and final reports,
and communicate with partners and institutions.

Step
four: overcoming unexpected challenges

All
research projects encounter unexpected problems. On this occasion, a
potentially major problem emerged when one of the archives, having previously
agreed in writing to participate, later expressed a desire to pull out of the
project. This resulted in delicate negotiations to address their concerns about
document conservation and project ownership. We offered a timeline to make a
final decision so that we could adjust our original plans and, maybe, find
another archive with which to partner. Fortunately for the project, we were
able to complete digitisation as planned. Extended negotiations were also
required in relation to governmental archives, with incredible patience and
local knowledge being required in order to secure bureaucratic permissions at
numerous levels.

The
next obstacle we faced was transferring money internationally. Vanderbilt
University houses these projects, so funds are transferred from the British
Library to Vanderbilt in instalments, and then from Vanderbilt to Brazil as
needed. In the first project, we paid unexpected taxes and fees on our
transfers to Brazil, with the values differing unpredictably from one transfer
to the next. Great patience was again required in order to successfully release
funds from the Brazilian banking system. For our second project, we partnered
with an NGO in Brazil in order to facilitate the administration of funds across
international institutions. This initially led to an unexpected amount of
paperwork in the United States, but this initial investment should make things
easier and cheaper in the longer term. Another
challenge involved our equipment. Knowing that we needed to produce RAW images
(for Canon that is CR2) and then convert to TIFF to meet EAP standards, we
purchased six Canon G12 cameras. The Canon G12 can take images in both CR2 and
JPG formats simultaneously. Each of our CR2 images, once converted to TIFF,
showed significant barrel distortion. We contacted Canon, who suggested that we
shoot from further away, which reduces the clarity of images. The only way to
remove the barrel distortion without altering the images would be to buy new
cameras, which was not within our budget. The EAP reluctantly agreed to accept
our JPG images, which, by definition, are altered. The CR2 images were
subsequently edited to remove some of the distortion. To avoid these problems,
we switched to the Canon EOS Rebel T3 in the second project, and our images no
longer suffer barrel distortion.

Finally:
celebrating accomplishment

We also
had unexpected victories. At the initial training workshops, students were
timid when using the equipment, since they were afraid they would break it. As
the project progressed, they came to speak and work like experts. Undergraduate
students who presented papers on their work at conferences repeatedly received
awards, and some were able to publish their work.

Graduate
students working on the project completed dissertations based on the digitised
documents and were able to make claims about Afro-Brazilian presence in the
interior of the state that upended previous historical understandings. We also
held an international symposium at the end of the project where they could
present their work to an audience made up of directors of local archives,
governmental representatives, and professors from Brazil and the United States.
Celebration is important to team morale. The team in Brazil puts day-to-day
travel, time, and diligence into these projects and their success must be
celebrated.

Without
these documents, we cannot study how the enslaved lived, who they married, who
they looked to for support, how they sought freedom, or how they interacted
with the state. Allowing these documents to disappear makes it easier for us to
forget slavery. Yet, the documents deteriorate before our eyes and often there
simply is not the time or funding to conserve or repair the physical copies.
Digitisation makes it possible to create a copy of documents on the brink of
vanishing forever, to preserve their content, and to make them available to
anyone with access to the internet.

About the author

Courtney J. Campbell is a historian and Mellon
Postdoctoral Fellow at Tougaloo College. She has directed two digitisation
projects in Brazil with funding from the British Library.